


Another Night

by Stonestrewn



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F, Internalized Misogyny, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 20:46:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1955583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/pseuds/Stonestrewn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Cap’n,” Isabela slurs, cheap liquor on her breath and laughter in her voice, “what a tall, brutish surprise. Come here often?”</p>
<p>“Not unless I get reports of a pantsless pirate going on wild rampages in my city.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spader7](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spader7/gifts).



> Started for a femslash february prompt, forgotten about for five months, found and finished.

Aveline drapes Isabela’s arm over her shoulder and pulls her to her feet with a little more force than might be strictly necessary. She’s heavier than expected – with her soft curves and generous padding in her hips and thighs it’s easy to forget that underneath she’s all dense muscle. Her boots scrape against the floorboards as she’s dragged through The Hanged Man. She’s very, very drunk.

“Cap’n,” Isabela slurs, cheap liquor on her breath and laughter in her voice, “what a tall, brutish surprise. Come here often?”

“Not unless I get reports of a pantsless pirate going on wild rampages in my city.”

“Rampages?” Isabela glares at Aveline, fixing her stare on a point slightly to the left of her head. “S’not. I was attacked, honest. And it was just, like, fifteen of them. _And_ they’re probably mostly alive.”

Upon closer inspection, mostly alive seems to be mostly right. The guards Aveline brought with her are rounding up the survivors, these sad excuses for swordsmen, and the patrons uninvolved in the scuffle haven’t let it interrupt them and simply moved their drinking closer to the walls. The conversations she overhears seem to be primarily on the subject of cursing the ‘guard dogs’ for arriving before anyone has had a chance to loot the bodies. It’s just another night in Lowtown. 

Aveline makes eye contact with Brennan, gives her a nod and gets a quick, but impeccable, salute in response. The routine is well established by now. Brennan handles the situation and she handles Isabela, gets the woman out of the fray and away from the justice Aveline is supposed to embody because her duties and her loyalties refuse to align and she is loyal even when it damns her, even when she wishes it would damn her more than it does because she can’t always decide whether it’s a virtue or a curse.

Even the fumes of Lowtown are a welcome sensory respite from the overwhelming atmosphere inside the tavern, the stink of piss from rats and humans alike, of sweat and blood and other fluids Aveline would rather not consider. It’s a cold, clear night. The moon is out and the light sharpens the edges of the shadows. Isabela groans and straightens a bit, relieving Aveline’s shoulder of some of her weight.

“Thanks for the help,” she says. “I’ve got it from here.”

Aveline doesn’t reply. She tightens her fingers around Isabela’s arm and starts walking, pulling her with. Isabela shifts her weight in the opposite direction, pulls against the hold.

“Seriously. I’ve got it.”

“I’m not helping, not this time” Aveline says. She pauses, long enough to enjoy Isabela’s confusion but not so long the other woman has time to come up with a retort. It’s not often Aveline gets the verbal upper hand. “I’m taking you in.”

Isabela groans again, louder.

“Oh, come _on_.”

“I’m done brushing over your little escapades. You’ve been out of control lately and it’s about time you learned a lesson.”

“What’s the point of going to the trouble of having companions if they won’t do you favors. I do things for you all the time!”

Aveline looks at her for a few seconds, hoping the absurdity of the statement will sink in on its own. When it’s clear that it won’t, it never will, she says:

“No. You really don’t.”

“I’m saving up for it. When it happens, oh, believe me. It’ll be absolutely spectacular.”

“I’ve had enough of your brand of spectacular,” Aveline says. “This isn’t an argument. You’re going in and that’s final.”

The stairs to Hightown seem to rise twice as high with an uncooperative drunk sailor hanging off your shoulder. She’s stumbling like that on purpose to make the climb all the more difficult, Aveline just knows it. 

“Get a move on,” she mutters, hoisting Isabela up so they can get a fresh start from the same step, and Isabela groans again, louder this time.

“I can’t believe your arresting me.”

“No need to get dramatic. You’re spending the night in a holding cell, that’s all.”

They make it, at last, to the top of the stairs. Hightown glows white in the moonlight, like the bones it was built on.

“What was it this time?” Aveline says. Isabela just stares at her, not parsing the question, so she adds, not without annoyance: “The brawl. What set you off?”

“Noting set _me_ off. Some thugs just drew on me.”

Aveline raises a brow.

“And you did nothing to provoke them.”

“No! There I was, minding my own business-“

“What business?”

“Oh, you know.

“What. Business.”

“Just… procuring funds for another round. For everyone. I’m a generous spirit of spirits,” Isabela says. Aveline glances at her just in time to catch the last lingering smugness of her smirk.

“You mean you swindled someone out of their money.”

“I _mean_ , won fair and square in a game of cards.”

“Isabela. You cheat. Then, you brag about it,” Aveline says and Isabela shakes her head, dark hair dancing.

“I cheat fairly and squarely.”

“Cheating _is_ provoking.”

Isabela scoffs.

“Only if you cheat whiny little babies who still needs someone to pull up their underpants after taking a piss.”

“If you’re still trying to sell me on the ‘unprovoked’ story, I hope I won’t have to hear that’s what you told them,” Aveline says. It takes some effort to keep her voice calm, her brows from giving away how deep the roots of her irritation go.

“Well,” Isabela says, letting the word roll around on her tongue for a few seconds. “Not quite. This really greasy one – you should have seen him, _ew_ – anyway, he called me a cunt-licking whore so I said ‘your mother seemed to like it’ and kicked him in the balls. You know, for emphasis.”

“And then they drew on you?”

“Yes.” She’s silent for a moment, then laughs, a short bark like the clang of two blades clashing. “…Sort of. I was already cutting them up by then, but they absolutely would have drawn on me first if they weren’t so slow.”

“Isabela!”

Aveline stares at her. She starts shaking her head - small, jerky twitches of disbelief – before catching herself and commanding her neck into rigidity. Isabela shrugs and the casual loose-jointedness of the motion is infuriating.

“What? It’s the thought that counts,” she says, grinning.

“You reckless, foolhardy…! These- These ridiculous, childish provocations-”

 “Hey now, if anyone was being provoked, it was me. Didn’t you hear what he called me?”

Aveline laughs, too, the corners of her mouth turned down, flings her scorn at the other woman’s face, at that smile that just keeps widening in spite of it all.

“Shouldn’t you be used to people calling you a whore by now?”

“Just because it doesn’t get under my skin doesn’t mean I want to sit down and take it.”

“Maybe if you had more _over_ your skin you wouldn’t be taken for one in the first place.”

“Right!” Isabela says with deadly cheer. Her eyes have gone stony but she is smiling, still. “I sure hope you don’t apply that line of reasoning with the poor girls who only have the bloody law to turn to when someone decides to take them for whatever and however they want.”

Hightown is not the maze of dead ends that Lowtown excels at being, but once you venture beyond the plazas the uniformity of the mansion facades and the nameless streets are disorienting in their own way. The buildings tower high enough to shroud some alleys in near perpetual shadow, they seem to lean in over you, scrutinizing you with their faceted windows. Aveline turns a corner and ends up in another square courtyard, the walls boxing her in.

“That’s completely different,” she says.

“Oh, how?”

The passage leading from the yard is a narrow corridor running through the western wing of the estate belonging to the Duchess of Starkhaven, and Aveline has to maneuver a bit to get both her and Isabela in side by side. Her teeth are gritted, her jaws ache.

“Whore.”

Isabela halts.

“You know what, don’t,” she says. “Not now, all right?“ She shuts her eyes, brushes a few sweat-matted tresses from her forehead. She isn’t smiling anymore. “I’ve been called a lot of things tonight and I’m beat so just lock me up and be done with it.”

Aveline snorts, as if she could blow the pang of shame out of her system. She’s grateful for the darkness of the passage hiding her treacherous, flushing skin – curse her blighted pallor. Isabela pats her a few times on the shoulder in a way possibly meant to be comforting. It ends up looking mostly like a one-winged seagull trying to take flight, since only half of the pats make contact.

“Just put me in a nice, cool cell. Tomorrow, you can have a go at me all you want and you bet I’ll match you insult to insult.”

She starts walking again. There are words on Aveline’s tongue – hard, cruel words – but she lets them go. Maybe she regrets that. She could maybe find new ones, something not so harsh on Isabela’s dusty boots and the scars on her arms, but the other woman has gone quiet and her face is closed, giving Aveline no leads. Soon, the stairs leading up to Viscount’s Keep are before them. They ascend in silence.

The guards at the door to the keep salute Aveline before holding the doors up, no questions asked. Inside, the entrance is dim and mostly empty, no throngs of impatient visitors for the viscounts crowding it. Aveline starts towards the arrest, but stops. She curses under her breath – this will damn her, this won’t damn her as much as it should – and goes the other way.

As they enter the barracks instead Isabela snaps out of whatever bout of introspection she was caught up in.  

“Wait a minute,” she says. “This isn’t the holding cells.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m not about to hang, am I? Because with my resume, going down for drunken disorderliness would be a crime in itself.”

“Of _course_ not.”

“So… Where to?”

“My room. You’ll sleep it off and leave before first patrol tomorrow morning.”

Isabela ponders this.

“What about Donnick?” she asks.

“He’s on night duty,” Aveline says, and gets a mischievous finger poking her cheek before she can turn her head away.

“Oh, Aveline. His pillow is still warm and here you are bringing another woman into your bed.”

“He won’t mind.”

They get a couple of furtive glances from a small night patrol just heading out when Isabela starts chanting:

“Donnick and Aveline, sitting in a tree. S-I-N-G-I-N-G!”

Aveline blinks.

“…Singing?”

“No, you dolt. S _winging_! As in-“ Isabela falters, frowns. “Hang on. S-I-N-G…” She counts on her fingers, mouthing the letters one by one, brows furrowed when they don’t add up. “Well, shit. I’m drunk.”

“You don’t say.”

Shutting the door to her chambers behind her, Aveline breathes a sigh of relief. She drops Isabela off on a low chair, who then proceeds to glide down on the floor in a tangle of limbs and pressing her forehead against the tiles. Since Aveline hasn’t drawn her sword even once tonight, there’s no need to clean it. She removes her armor, taking her usual care with the process, and changes into her night clothes.

Despite her wearing so much less, helping Isabela out of her blood-stained apparel is a nightmare in comparison. Just undoing all the clasps on her mile-high boots takes a good quarter of an hour. Isabela is distinctly uncooperative, rolling out of Aveline’s hands on multiple occasions and demanding to be put to bed fully equipped because “a pirate’s always ready to shank.” Her nonsense doesn’t fly. Aveline unlaces her bodice, removes four hidden daggers as well as a shiv, and leaves the heavy gold jewelry alone because even she knows not to push it too far.   

Finally, they are both in bed. Isabela wears one of Aveline’s night shirts (though she refused to lace it up properly in the neck) and she buries her face in Donnick’s white linen pillow case, seemingly content with her current situation despite the previous struggle. The last thing Aveline sees before snuffing out the last candle and nestling in under the covers is Isabela stretching like a cat and yawning.

Everything is quiet for a while. Aveline has almost fallen asleep, when she feels a touch on her arm. She opens her eyes. Isabela is leaning over her, the moonlight pouring through the window giving her hair and skin an ethereal glow. Her lips are slightly parted. Her eyes gleam. When she closes in Aveline has already predicted it yet she doesn’t turn her head, doesn’t raise her hand, just shuts her eyes and listens to her own beating heart as she waits for contact.

The kiss is surprisingly chaste – no tongue and no coaxing, just the soft, dry press of Isabela’s lips to hers. For an aching moment Aveline imagines Isabela on top of her, her full breasts flush against Aveline’s chest, her thighs straddling Aveline’s hips. Then she puts one hand of each of her shoulders and gently pushes Isabela away.

“You’re drunk.”

Isabela rolls her eyes.

“You don’t say.”

“I won’t take advantage of you like this.”

“But I _want_ to be taken advantage of,” Isabela whines, making to snuggle closer again, but Aveline holds her off.

“You have your judgment impaired right now.”

“Ha! You’re admitting my judgment is generally sound.”

“That is _definitely_ not what I’m saying.”

Apparently interpreting this as a satisfactory enough victory, Isabela flops back down on her side of the bed.

“Oh no, big girl. No take-backsies.”

The tension in Aveline’s neck instantly returns. The retaliation taunts are bashing against her teeth, ready to storm out and tear at the woman by her side. Isabela, sensing the mood shift, looks at her. Aveline holds her gaze.

“I hate when you call me that,” she says.

In the dim bedchamber it’s hard to tell whether Isabela’s cheeks darken, but the little gulp when she swallows is audible and her words are perfectly clear when she says:

“…I know.” She sighs with exhausted sincerity. “I’m terrible.”

Aveline takes a deep breath, relaxes her muscles and, for the first time that night, she offers Isabela a smile.

“Aren’t we all?”

Isabela laughs and it’s neither the joyful trill she lets out during battle nor the hard mirth after a cutting remark, like the cling of coins pouring into a cup. It’s low and tender, nestling behind closed lips – Aveline has scarcely heard it. 

“I’d drink to that if someone hadn’t cruelly separated me from my booze,” Isabela says.

“Just go to sleep.”

She drifts off to the sound of Isabela’s even breathing, and in the morning it’s the absence at her side that wakes her.


End file.
